DOWNEY AND THE DRUG WAR

Actor Robert Downey Jr. is California's glassy-eyed poster boy for the
failed war on drugs. After numerous arrests dating back to 1996 and several
fruitless attempts by the courts to rehabilitate him, Mr. Downey served a
year in state prison. Barely three months after his release, the Hollywood
celebrity was arrested again on Thanksgiving weekend for possession and use
of cocaine and methamphetamine.

Mr. Downey's troubles are the butt of water-cooler jokes around the
country. But to anyone who has seen a loved one struggle with addiction,
there's nothing funny about his plight. Mr. Downey is a hopeless junkie
whose father reportedly introduced him to marijuana when he was just 6
years old. Law enforcement officials may think it's good social policy to
make an example of the actor's weaknesses. However, Mr. Downey's case
simply underscores that the drug war is a costly and selective form of
government paternalism that has done far more harm than good.

A new book of essays issued by the libertarian Cato Institute, "After
Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century," sheds
harsh light on what eminent economist Milton Friedman calls the "social
tragedy" of drug prohibition. In his foreword to the book, Mr. Friedman
points out that the list of illegal drugs includes marijuana - "for which
there is no recorded case of a human death from overdose in several
thousand years of use" - but excludes alcohol, "for which the annual death
toll in the United States alone is measured in the tens if not hundreds of
thousands."

Mr. Friedman decries the looming conversion of the United States into a
police state as a result of draconian drug war tactics. "The annual arrest
of nearly a million and a half people suspected of a drug offense, most of
them for simple possession of small quantities, is frightening evidence of
how far along that road we have already gone."

Most of those behind bars, unlike Mr. Downey, can't afford to post bail or
hire competent lawyers. Julie Stewart of Families Against Mandatory
Minimums points out that drug offenders now make up 60 percent of the
federal prison population, up from 38 percent 14 years ago; in 1998, 57
percent were first offenders and 88 percent had no weapons. "We are not
catching drug kingpins," Miss Stewart writes. "We are catching the little
guys, the girlfriends, the mules, and we are sending them to prison for 5
years, 10 years, and often much longer."

Until recently, the government often mocked drug war opponents as a motley
crew of free-market intellectuals, ex-hippies, and potheads. But cops on
the front lines of the drug war, firsthand witnesses to its futility, are
joining the critics. David Klinger, a former police officer in Los Angeles
and Redmond, Wash., writes of his evolution in thinking about drug policy:
"At some point in my first months on patrol, after handling hundreds of
calls that involved drugs, and after arresting scores of people for
possessing various sorts of illegal stuff, I began to have doubts about
what my peers and I were doing. I saw violent criminals walking the streets
because the jail space they rightfully deserved was occupied by nonviolent
drug offenders."

"I started seeing most of the people I dealt with who had some association
with drugs either as broken souls who made self-destructive choices or
harmless people who indulged their appetites in moderation - but not as
crooks who needed to be punished." Mr. Klinger, now a criminology
professor, concluded from his years on the street: "We cannot protect free
adults from their own poor choices, and we should not use the force of law
to try."

Black and white, young and old, famous and nameless - Americans from all
walks of life can identify with the broken soul of Robert Downey Jr. His
addiction is his own prison. His public humiliation is its own life
sentence. The war on drugs is an expensive quagmire that needlessly
punishes people who have already punished themselves beyond repair.

Michelle Malkin is a nationally syndicated columnist.